Institutional ownership 13F form downloads from SEC and Bloomberg

This is a discussion on Institutional ownership 13F form downloads from SEC and Bloomberg within the Data Feeds forums, part of the Methods category; Hi,
I work with fund-of-funds, and want to automate how we get our 13F (the SEC form which funds have ...

I work with fund-of-funds, and want to automate how we get our 13F (the SEC form which funds have to file stating their long holdings in US Equity related securities) data.

I have looked into writing a macro to get the data from the SEC and from Bloomberg

Regarding Bloomberg:

1. I want to download the entire list of securities that a given fund is holding, rather than the institutional owners of given securities. In the terminal this is done via FLNG or PHDC or looking at the information for a given fund (which usually have tickers like H12345-1). But I have not managed to get this done automatically in Excel. I have done everything I could think of with the BB Excel add-in, and the Bloomberg helpdesk simply says that what I want to do is not possible. Any ideas?

Regarding the SEC:

1. I saw that one can access the data via FTP or via the Public Dissemination Service. I understand that the latter is paid but might be faster and easier to work with. Can anybody comment on which option is best?

2. Does anybody have any good macros for getting the FTP data and cleaning up the txt files for this kind of thing?